How Michael Gove is dumbing down England’s schools

Abstract

‘Dumbing down’ may seem a strange accusation. Isn’t Gove insistent on ‘raising standards’, like Conservative education ministers before him? We need to dig beneath the familiar rhetoric and expose what lies beneath the surface - look at the impact of policies and not just their headline appeal. When Tory politicians talk about ‘high standards’, they invariably link this to exclusiveness. They cannot imagine other people’s children being as well educated as their own. That is why, for all their insistence that class size makes no difference, they pay large amounts of money to make sure their own children are taught in very small groups. Exam results in England have gone up every year, so the Tories automatically assume that they must be getting easier. They simply cannot accept that children other than their own can be successful learners.